We also have to make reading less "precious" ie we need to make it clear that there are many ways to "read" and for example that audiobooks count as books.

People are skeptical about the decline in numbers of people who read books in the U.S. but you only need to talk with high schoolers to see that it's not overblown. It's part of the reason that the revival of zines is important IMO because they make reading and writing less daunting.

😮😮Unbelievable. Texas A&M censors Plato readings.

"Hilton is — and has always been — a welcoming place for all", Hilton reassured the angry fascists.

I haven’t seen any reporting on this yet but I have to imagine this is related to all the protests outside hotels where ICE agents are staying. People are showing up outside hotels and banging drums and making loud noises all through the night. It has to be having an impact.

My personal guiding question remains this: What have I done to alleviate suffering today? Convinced that being able to answer that affirmatively each night is what has powered me through the past few years, and lets me sleep at night.

Nausicaä is technically pre-Ghibli but it would be my favorite My favorite Ghibli proper is Princess Mononoke, and I have a full ranking of all of them on my Letterboxd: letterboxd.com/valyrina/lis...

"Fanfiction allows people to explore identity, sexuality, trauma and love through characters they already trust. For many queer readers and writers, it was the first place they saw themselves represented."

I strongly feel that the difference between "I am making naked images of children" and "I have created a program that makes naked pictures of children when people ask it to" would not be as strongly apparent if it were not a billionaire doing it.

If you still need to share a link to a tweet, but don't want to send people to Musk's cesspool - replace "x" with "xcancel" in the tweet link. For example x.com/dril/status/... becomes xcancel.com/dril/status/... People will still see the tweet, but without going to Twitter.

Gee, seems like universities should not be foisting this flawed product on their students, right?

This is another important point. Even if you think impeachment is risky to neutral politically, it burns their legislative time and energy. One of many tools an opposition can deploy. bsky.app/profile/apri...

Another post from a Venezuelan friend:

Expect to see a lot of this classic Onion headline, from 23 years ago, over the coming weeks.

Whenever I correctly point out that there is no opposition party in US politics, the usual suspects swarm to screech about Dems having no power. If these folks are correct (they are not), then they should BUILD POWER. They aren't doing that.

This could be us but you playin

this is such an important thing to recognize and call out the fascism is mostly done being nice at this point, but it got here through well dressed men politely asking questions while the rest of us were scolded for pointing out where those questions led

Hakeem Jeffries was not briefed on the operation, Jake Sherman is now reporting. Neither was House Armed Services Committee. Amazing.

if you are talking today about how bad maduro was and were alive, at all, during the run-up to the iraq war you are potentially the dumbest person to ever live

A consensus is emerging.

“Self-deport” is a whitewashed way to describe “fleeing the country under the threat of state violence.” I agree with Maria here — it’s important to call that exactly what it is.

Praise be to beaver.

working at a university

USPS quietly changed its postmark rules — mail is no longer dated when you drop it off. The “official” date is when it hits automated sorting — sometimes days later Which could have major implications for mail in voting — it’s a clever way to disenfranchise voters that’s going largely overlooked

if they had just shown it on 60 Minutes nobody would have seen it

Bringing back Limewire to illegally rip copies of reporting suppressed by the government is definitely some cyberpunk shit

Coming back to this, I'm still struck by the implication that academics should care if the AI pushers "trust" all our work that's done without AI. I don't know, man, you all seemed to trust our work enough to steal it from us wholesale.

This means a lot to me! Cherokee Nation is taking control of the cemetery where Elias Boudinot is buried. Elias Boudinot, a relative and the publisher of the first Native-run newspaper in the U.S. He was murdered for signing the Treaty of New Echota.

Chicagoan of the Year in Books: If you’re into horror, thank the librarian Becky Spratford 📚 www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/16/c...

For generations people “cut off” parents by moving away and mailing them a card once a year. Travel and long distance phone calls were expensive; distance effectively cut people off w/o being so explicit. The difference now is that communication is cheap so cutting them off requires being explicit.

The University of Oklahoma made headlines after a grading dispute erupted into controversy, leading OU to put instructor Mel Curth on leave. In the process, OU has not defended Curth from targeted harassment. Sign on to this petition to demand that OU protect principles of academic freedom.

a wealth tax is a winning issue.

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

♥️ “ICE looked at that school, saw a community standing up for families, and decided it wasn’t worth it.”

On AI cannibalism: "Calculators expanded reasoning; the printing press spread knowledge. ChatGPT, by contrast, doesn’t extend cognition—it automates it, turning thinking itself into a service. Rather than democratizing learning, it privatizes the act of thinking under corporate control."

no idea

"It would not possible to halt a pandemic, therefore we have no choice but to make it as bad as possible."

some significant part of this is just catch-all fear for “this is not the child I ordered” I think

UPDATE: Another Chicago-area church has put up an immigration-themed Nativity scene. A church member at Urban Village Church sent this one along, where Mary, Joseph and Jesus are gone and replaced with a sign that reads: “Due to ICE activity in our community, the Holy Family is in hiding.”

From leading abolitionist organizers, How To End Family Policing is a much-needed intervention arguing that the systems that purport to protect children make them—and our communities—less safe. www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2609-h...

i’m at the brooklyn training. amazing energy.

I am BEGGING people to stop dismissing shit like the OU debacle as "red state bullshit." They start it here bc they know they have the backing of the politicians who will put funding pressure on schools. But this is the model they will expand everywhere. that they are ALREADY expanding everywhere.

Two independent studies found that AI chatbots were better at persuading voters than political ads. The most persuasive bots also lied the most. This is something that humans working in psyops have known for decades. AI is psyops at scale. www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/04/1...

as a trans TA, this story makes my blood boil so much. if some conservative claims my grades are discriminating against them, i get to go fuck myself. and any of the trans TAs under me can doubly go fuck themselves bigoted students will be cashing in on this bullshit as long as schools allow.